Fiber Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) is a technology used for transporting Fiber Channel (FC) frames using Ethernet switches and connections, which is currently being standardized at the Technical Committee for Fiber Channel (T11) of the International Committee for Information Technology Standards (INCITS). FCoE technology enables users to establish a unified network infrastructure for data centers based on Ethernet. The capability to transport FC data on top of an Ethernet network alleviates the problem of maintaining a separate storage area network (SAN) and Ethernet network. FCoE integrates FC based networks with Ethernet based networks by mapping FC frames over Ethernet frames and transmitting the FC frames on Ethernet links. As a result, FCoE institutes a converged network that reduces the complexity, space, and cost necessary to maintain the data center and Ethernet network infrastructure.
Unfortunately, current FCoE technology fails to provide a seamless and complete integration between an FC/FCoE based networks and an Ethernet based networks. Through the use of special FCoE switches, such as Fiber Channel Forwarders (FCFs), current FCoE technology replaces the FC physical (FC-0) and FC coding (FC-1) layers of the FC architecture with the Ethernet physical and Media Access Control (MAC) layers of the Ethernet architecture without altering the FC framing (FC-2) layer and higher layers. As a result, FCoE switches are able to support forwarding both FCoE frames and regular Ethernet frames. However, to support both types of data frames, the FCoE switches require one data plane and one control plane to manage the regular Ethernet frames and another data plane and control plane to manage FCoE frames.
Furthermore, FCoE networks still employ the Fabric Shortest Path First (FSPF) routing protocol used in FC networks to populate forwarding tables for the FCoE switches. Thus, current FCoE technology still forward FCoE frames hop-by-hop using the FC Destination_Identifier (D_ID). Conversely, Ethernet networks may implement Ethernet Layer 2 Multi Path (L2MP) technologies, such as Transparent Interconnection of Lots of Links (TRILL) and Shortest Path Bridging (SPB) that use link-state routing protocols instead of FSPF. Hence, within a unified data center network, the routing and data forwarding policies for the FCoE network may be incompatible with the Ethernet network. Accordingly, the unified data center network manages separate data and control planes when the FCoE network and Ethernet network are completely or partially logically separated from each other. One data plane and one control plane manages the data for the Ethernet network, while a second data plane and a second control plane manages the data for FCoE network. Thus, new technology is necessary to reduce the complexity of the unified data center network caused from managing the dual data and control planes.